The Final Fantasy Mega Thread - Now playing FFXV

So been avoiding this thread cause I was going through the game but got it late(amazon sent it on monday, then the fuckers delivering it took until thursday to get it from one side of Paris to the other, then the fucker didn't bother trying to deliver it and just left a note in my mailbox even though I was here AND the game fits in the box anyway so I had to pick it up on friday instead). Definitely one of the better FF, especially compared to the more recent ones. Like a huge jump in quality in my opinion compared to the trend of X > XII > XIII which was downhill for me.

Main issues I had with the game is how easy it is to overlevel the story and the lack of scaling, makes a lot of the fights besides the last boss fight of the game a complete joke if you did too many sidequests. I kinda did cause I had to clear shit from my log before progressing through the "you can't come back later" type of message, only to find out I probably shouldn't have. I started the point of no return story stuff at almost 60 and pretty much everything from that point on is 30. Last dungeon and bosses are somewhat scaled or just scripted too much not sure but that's the only thing that was interesting combat wise at that point.

Combat is fun, and decently deep, can kinda mash but you can also abuse teleports, counters and blindside links to speed up shit a lot, there's a lot of variety too with all the weapons Noctis gets and you can kinda combo them together it's pretty nice. Magic is a bit weird, in the sense that's it grossly overpowered if you bother with it, can easily make triple cast ~120potency spells with just the first AP node for like 100g, and that shit will damage cap before you limit break, 3 times in a row, so you kinda melt everything down. Balanced by the fairly long cooldown and the fact you hurt yourself I guess. The lack of healing as a mechanic and instead the reliance on "free" no limit healing is also a bit weird. Early on I used Ignis aoe heal move a lot, but eventually I just started chugging pots cause I had enough gold anyway. Kinda hard to wipe to anything the way items are setup.

Story was pretty good I thought. Some weird stuff here and there and feels a bit rushed at times, or too long at others(this fucking chapter 13 dungeon was like twice as long as it should have been), but overall the tone and themes were solid, the main cast were surprisingly likable, even fucking Prompto who I thought I'd hate(helped I watched the Brotherhood anime before playing, explains his childhood a bit and makes him more relatable), the villain and other major characters were also good, even some of the sidequests have interesting stories and shit. It's no FF6, but it was pretty nice, it didn't do overly complex shit just for the sake of "so spiritual yo" like XIII.

The world and side content seemed all really good. I haven't finished all the side content stuff, have a bunch of dungeons to do and some 60+ hunts I wanna do, but some of the optional dungeons were surprisingly nicely designed, with not just a bunch of hallways but larger confusing rooms and multiple paths. Not like crazy 80s-90s design, but better than the shit they've recently done. And everything looks gorgeous. Also love the mix of modern and fantasy, works well for the most part. Music was nice, having a bunch of selectable OSTs from past games in the car was a great idea, kinda sucks that the selection is very uneven though, FF6 only has like 6tracks(and it was a pain in the ass to get the tape too) while some other games like XI have 4, and all of them are missing tracks.

I kinda wished I had a SSD when doing some of the quests cause the loadings on the normal PS4 HDD take stupid amounts of time, when switching regions it often takes 2+mins to load, and even doing small "fast" travel often takes 30-50secs. Sometimes it's faster to just drive there lol. Oh and Prompto fucking sucks at taking pictures and selfies should be a filter you can remove like all the other garbage filters. Fucker looks like an alien on selfies too so he basically ruins them all. But overall, I'm very happy with the game, especially considering the disaster it looked like it could have been after the developement hell shit they went through.

Beat it and I cant help but feel disappointed. Chapter 13 is a definate shit show and it took me 3-4 days just to have the willpower to slog through that garbage. I feel they spent more time developing this MMOish openworld questhub crap vs having a deeper story. I dont mind an open world but I miss how in previous FF's you'd find cool secrets by accident / exploration and it didnt mean you'd get less of a story. Also someone needs to murder the person at square that has such a love of depth of field starting ~3' in front of your character combined with the ever present Square shitty AA that results in a shimmering blurry mess. The ending scenes of the enviornment looked AMAZING compared to what you see during the actual game (normal PS4). I get the feeling those scenes were added just to show off HDR through considering the time of day/lighting shown during them.

Malakriss said:

(Linking the reddit thread cause source is in japanese) Spoilers: Square Enix Just announced a massive series of updates to make Chapter 13 better and improve the story. • /r/FFXV

Spoiler free summary: Square is planning free updates to the base game starting with overhauling Chapter 13 in the short term, then adding more cutscenes to Chapter 9-14 in general, and later on making playable sections for most of the non-party characters. Miscellaneous additions will include New Game+, challenge modes, and avatar creation so you can design your own model to replace the default Noctis. They expect to continue making updates for a few years.

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This is good news! Older Noct > emo Noct.

Talenvor said:

Anyone else's launch PS4's sound like an airlplane taking off the entire time FF15 is on? As soon as I start playing my fan sounds like a hair dryer and doesn't quiet down until I close the game. Digital verision, if it matters, and I don't have this issue with other games.

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Personally my PS4 does that with every games, I've kinda gotten used to it, shit's just noisy as fuck. Weird you don't get it on other games.

Changes to the story sounds nice, maybe I'll replay it eventually.